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Mr. Claro -- Modern Nonfiction

Reading Selection by Cynthia Ozick

The First Day of School: Washington Square, 1946

RAISED IN THE BRONX, Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928) took her B.A. at New York University, went out to Ohio State University/or her M.A., married a lawyer, bore a daughter, and returned to live in New Rochelle. She is a novelist and short-story writer, with a strong second calling in the essay. Her first novel was Trust in 1966. More recently she published a book of short stories, Levitation (1982); an essay collection, Art and Ardor (1983); and in the same year another novel, The Cannibal Galaxy. Also in 1983 she was presented with one of the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Awards, thirty-five thousand dollars a year for five years in support of her work. In 1987 she published The Messiah of Stockholm, only four years after her previous novel, which had come sixteen years after her first. "The First Day of School" appeared in Harper's in 1989 when she also published Metaphor and Memory, a collection of essays. In the same year she published The Shawl, a novella and a short story about the Holocaust.

In an interview in Publishers Weekly, Ozick discloses unusual habits. Most writers as they get older tend to write early in the morning, when they feel their energy highest. Cynthia Ozick writes late at night. She finishes when dawn arrives with "the racket of those damn birds. . . . The depth of the night is guilt free, responsibility free; nobody will telephone you, importune you, make any claims on you. You own the world." She also acknowledges that "my first draft is the last." But she defines "first draft" so that we understand her: A first draft can be the product of much scratching around. "I must perfect each sentence madly before I go on to the next," she says, because "at the end I want to be finished."

This portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honorable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare - the look of having had something of a social history. - HENRY JAMES, Washington Square

I first came down to Washington Square on a colorless February morning in 1946. I was seventeen and a half years old and was carrying my lunch in a brown paper bag, just as I had carried it to high school

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On that day I had never heard of Oliver Wendell Holmes or The Yellow Book, and Washington Square was a faraway bower where wounded birds fell out of trees. My brother had once brought home from Washington Square Park a baby sparrow with a broken leg, to be nurtured back to flight. It died instead, emitting in its last hours melancholy faint cheeps, and leaving behind a dense recognition of the minute explicitness of morality All the same, in the February grayness Washington Square had the allure of the celestial unknown. A sparrow might die, but my own life was luminously new: I felt my youth like a nimbus.

Which dissolves into the dun gauze of a low and sullen city sky And here I am flying out of the Lexington Avenue subway at Astor Place, just a few yards from Wanamaker's, here I am turning a corner past a secondhand bookstore and a union hall; already late, I begin walking very fast toward the park. The air is smoky with New York winter grit, and on clogged Broadway a mob of trucks shifts squawking gears. But there, just ahead, crisscrossed by paths under high branches, is Washington Square; and on a single sidewalk, three clear omens - or call them riddles, intricate and redolent. These I will disclose in a moment, but before that you must push open the heavy brass-and-glass doors of the Main Building and come with me, at a hard and panting pace, into the lobby of Washington Square College on the earliest morning of my freshman year.

On the left, a bank of elevators. Straight ahead, a long burnished corridor, spooky as a lit tunnel. And empty, all empty I can hear my solitary footsteps reverberate, as in a radio mystery drama: They lead me up a short staircase into a big dark ghost-town cafeteria. My brother's letter, along with his account of the physics and chemistry laboratories (I will never see them), has already explained that this place is called Commons - and here my heart will learn to shake with the merciless newness of life. But not today; today there is nothing. Tables and chairs squat in dead silhouette. I race back through a silent maze of halls and stairways to the brass-and-glass doors -there stands a lonely guard. From the pocket of my coat I retrieve a scrap with a classroom number on it and ask the way The guard announces in a sly croak that the first day of school is not yet; come back tomorrow, he says.

A dumb bad joke: I'm humiliated. I've journeyed the whole way down from the end of the line - Pelham Bay, in the northeast Bronx - to find myself in desolation, all because of a muddle: Tuesday isn't

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Across the street from the Main Building, the three omens. First, a pretzel man with a cart. He's wearing a sweater, a cap that keeps him faceless -he's nothing but the shadows of his creases - and wool gloves with the fingertips cut off. He never moves; he might as well be made of papiermach6, set up and left out in the open since spring. There are now almost no pretzels for sale, and this gives me a chance to inspect the construction of his bare pretzel-poles. The pretzels are hooked over a column of gray cardboard cylinders, themselves looped around a stick, the way horseshoes drop around a post. The cardboard cylinders are the insides of toilet paper rolls.

The pretzel man is rooted between a Chock Full 0' Nuts (that's the second omen) and a newsstand (that's the third). The Chock Full: The doors are like fans, whirling remnants of conversation. She will marry him. She will not marry him. Fragrance of coffee and hot chocolate. We can prove that the sens~es are partial and unreliable vehicles of information, but who is to say that reason is not equally a product of human limitation? Powdered doughnut sugar on their lips. Attached to a candy store, the newsstand. Copies of Partisan Review: the table of the gods. Jean Stafford, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Irving Howe, Delmore Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, Clement Greenberg, Stephen Spender, William Phillips, John Berryman, Saul Bellow, Philip Rahv, Richard Chase, Randall Jarrell, Simone de Beauvoir, Karl Shapiro, George Orwell! I don't know a single one of these names, but I feel their small conflagration flaming in the gray street: the succulent hotness of their promise. I mean to penetrate every one of them. Since all the money I have is my subway fare - a nickel - I don't buy a copy (the price of Partisan in 1946 is fifty cents); I pass on.

I pass on to the row of houses on the north side of the square. Henry 10 James was born in one of these, but I don't know that either. Still, they are plainly old, though no longer aristocratic: haughty last-century shabbies with shut eyelids, built of rosy-ripe respectable brick, down on their luck. Across the park bulks Judson Church, with its squat squarish bell tower; by the end of the week I will be languishing at the margins of a basketball game in its basement, forlorn in my blue left-over-from-high-school gym suit and mooning over Emily Dickinson:

There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons -That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes -

There is more I don't know. I don't know that W. H. Auden lives just down there, and might at any moment be seen striding toward home under his tall rumpled hunch; I don't know that Marianne Moore is only up the block, her doffed tricorn resting on her bedroom dresser. It's Greenwich Village - I know that - no more than twenty years after Edna St. Vincent Millay has sent the music of her name (her best,

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Begin with the benches in the park. Here, side by side with students and their looseleafs, lean or lie the shadows of the pretzel man, his creased ghosts or doubles: all those pitiables, half-women and half-men, neither awake nor asleep; the discountable, the repudiated, the unseen. No more notice is taken of any of them than of a scudding fragment of newspaper in the path. Even then, even so long ago, the benches of Washington Square are pimpled with this hell-tossed crew, these Mad Margarets and Cokey Joes, these volcanic coughers, shakers, groaners, tremblers, droolers, blasphemers, these public urinators with vomitous breath and rusted teeth stumps, dead-eyed and self-abandoned, dragging their makeshift junkyard shoes, their buttonless layers of raggedy ratfur. The pretzel mazi with his toilet paper rolls conjures and spews them all - he is a loftier brother to these citizens of the lower pox, he is guardian of the garden of the jettisoned. They rattle along all the seams of Washington Square. They are the pickled city, the true and universal City-Below-Cities, the wolfish vinegar-Babylon that dogs the spittled skirts of bohemia. The toilet paper rolls are the temple columns of this sacred grove.

Next, the whirling doors of Chock Full 0' Nuts. Here is the marketplace of Washington Square, its bazaar, its roiling gossip-parlor, its matchmaker's office and arena - the outermost wing, so to speak, evolved from the Commons. On a day like today, when the Commons is closed, the Chock Full is thronged with extra power, a cello making up for a missing viola. Until now, the fire of my vitals has been for the imperious tragedians of the Aeneid; I have lived in the narrow throat of poetry Another year or so of this oblivion, until at last I am hammerstruck with the shock of Europe's skull, the bled planet of death camp and war. Eleanor Roosevelt has not yet written her famous column announcing the discovery of Anne Frank's diary The term cold war is new. The Commons, like the college itself, is overcrowded, veterans in their pragmatic thirties mingling with the reluctant dreamy young. And the Commons is convulsed with politics: A march to the docks is organized, no one knows by whom, to protest the arrival of Walter Gieseking, the German musician who flourished among Nazis. The Communists - two or three readily recognizable cantankerous zealots - stomp through with their daily leaflets and sneers. There is even a Monarchist, a small poker-faced rectangle of a man with secretive tireless eyes who, when approached for his views, always demands, in perfect Bronx tones, the restoration of his king. The engaged girls - how many of them there seem to be! - flash their rings and tangle their ankles in their long New Look skirts. There is no feminism and no feminists: I am, I think, the only one. The Commons is a tide: It washes up the cold war, it washes up the engaged girls' rings, it washes up the several philosophers and the numerous poets. The philosophers are all existentialists; the poets are all influenced by The Waste Land. When the Commons overflows, the engaged girls cross the street to show their rings at the Chock Full.

Call it density, call it intensity, call it continuity: Call it, finally, society. The Commons belongs to the satirists. Here, one afternoon, is Alfred Chester, holding up a hair, a single strand, before a crowd. (He will one day write stories and novels. He will die young.) "What is that hair?" I innocently ask, having

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In or about February 1946 human nature does not change; it keeps on. On my bedroom wall I tack - cut out from Life magazine - the wildest Picasso I can find: a face that is also a belly Mr. George E. Mutch, a lyrical young English teacher still in his twenties, writes on the blackboard: "When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd," and "Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang," and "A green thought in a green shade"; he tells us to burn, like Pater, with a hard, gemlike flame. Another English teacher -older and crustier - compares Walt Whitman to a plumber; the next year he is rumored to have shot himself in a wood. The initial letters of Washington Square College are a device to recall three of the seven deadly sins: Wantonness, Sloth, Covetousness. In the Commons they argue the efficacy of the orgone box. Eda Lou Walton, sprightly as a bird, knows all the Village bards, and is a Village bard herself. Sidney Hook is an intellectual rumble in the logical middle distance. Homer Watt, chairman of the English department, is the very soul who, in a far-off time of bewitchment, hired Thomas Wolfe. orgone box Invented by the Austrian psychiatrist and biophysicist Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), the orgone box was supposed to restore human energy; it was declared a fraud.

And so, in February 1946, I make my first purchase of a "real" book -which is to say, not for the classroom. It is displayed in the window of the secondhand bookstore between the Astor Place subway station and the union hall, and for weeks I have been coveting it: Of Time and the River. I am transfigured; I am pierced through with rapture; skipping gym, I sit among morning mists on a windy bench a foot from the stench of Mad Margaret, sinking into that cascading syrup:

Man's youth is a wonderful thing: It is so full of anguish and of magic and he never comes to know it as it is, until it is gone from him forever.... And what is the essence of that strange and bitter miracle of life which we feel so poignantly so unutterably, with such a bitter pain and joy, when we are young?

Thomas Wolfe, lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again! In Washington Square I am appareled in the "numb exultant secrecies of fog, fog-numb air filled with solemn joy of nameless and impending prophecy, an ancient yellow light, the old smoke-ochre of the morning....

The smoke-ochre of the morning. Ah, you who have flung Thomas Wolfe, along with your strange and magical youth, onto the ash-heap of juvenilia and excess, myself among you, isn't this a lovely phrase still? It rises out of the old pavements of Washington Square as delicately colored as an eggshell.

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The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, one of the veterans heckles, "What about getting a Buick, what about spending a buck?" Chester, at sixteen, is a whole year younger than I; he has transparent eyes and a rosebud mouth7 and is in love with a poet named Diana. He has already found his way to the Village bars, and keeps in his wallet Truman Capote's secret telephone number. We tie our scarves tight against the cold and walk up and down Fourth Avenue, winding in and out of the rows of secondhand bookshops crammed one against the other. The proprietors sit reading their wares and never look up. The books in all their thousands smell sleepily of cellar. Our envy of them is speckled with longing; our longing is sick with envy We are the sorrowful literary young.

Every day, month after month, I hang around the newsstand near the candy store, drilling through the enigmatic pages of Partisan Review. I still haven't bought a copy; I still can't understand a word. I don't know what cold war means. Who is Trotsky? I haven't read Ulysses; my adolescent phantoms are rowing in the ablative absolute with pius Aeneas. I'm in my mind's cradle, veiled by the exultant secrecies of fog.

Washington Square will wake me. In a lecture room in the Main Building, Dylan Thomas will cry his webwork syllables. Afterward he'll warm himself at the White Horse Tavern. Across the corridor I will see Sidney Hook plain. I will read the Bhagavad-Gita and Catullus and Lessing, and, in Hebrew, a novel eerily called Whither? It will be years and years before I am smart enough, worldly enough, to read Alfred Kazin and Mary McCarthy

In the spring, all of worldly Washington Square will wake up to the luster of little green leaves.

AFTERWORD

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Joe%20Claro/D...OOL/gr%2012%2003-04/Nonfic%20pieces/Ozick/Ozick.htm (6 of 7)11/18/2005 8:11:07 PM Untitled Document The first day at college is a universal sub]ect, though the particulars of Washington Square will clash with the particulars of Ann Arbor, Eugene, Tuscaloosa, and College Station - any college station. Many of Ozick's essays are moral and even religious. This reminiscent piece is colored with a remembered past redolent of what's to come, the future nascent in the moment. In Art and Ardor Ozick had written: "The secrets that engage me - that sweep me away - are generally secrets of an inheritance: how the pear seed becomes a pear tree, for instance, rather than a polar bear. Ideas are emotions that penetrate the future of coherence -" This essay performs an odd trick. It tells of the future, of life after the first day, in a persistent series of negatives: "I did not know," "I had not read," "Later this or that will happen." The device collapses the years into the box 0/a narrow moment.

BOOKS AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK

The Cannibal Galaxy. New York: Dutton. Novel. The Messiah of Stockholm. New York: Random House-Vintage. Novel. The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories. New York: Penguin Books. Short stories. The Shawl. New York: Random House-Vintage. Novella and short story.

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